UGA vet school eyes expansion to new campus

The new complex of more than a dozen interlocked structures would be tucked behind existing UGA buildings on more than 100 acres the university owns at College Station and Barnett Shoals roads. Called the Veterinary Medical Learning Center, the buildings would include barns, classrooms, offices and a state-of-the-art teaching hospital, where veterinary students will learn how to diagnose and treat sick animals.

The goal is not just to replace the existing hospital students now train in, but to provide space so that the vet school can enroll more students and turn out more veterinarians.

"We're bursting at the seams, basically," said Dean Sheila Allen.

In the college's space on UGA's South Campus, there's just no more room to grow, Allen said.

The vet school now admits 102 new students a year, up from 86 a few years ago. Administrators would like to boost the entering classes to 150 students, but there's no room at either the teaching hospital or in vet school classrooms to do that, she said.

The existing hospital not only is too small for bigger class sizes in the future — it's really too small now, said Scott Brown, head of the college's department of small animal medicine and surgery.

The college has lost classroom space and office space over the years, as rooms were converted into treatment and diagnostic areas, Brown said.

Students and teachers now meet for daily rounds in a cafeteria, because classrooms once used for the morning sessions have been taken over for other uses. Faculty offices also have been crammed into unlikely spaces.

"I have one faculty member in a projection booth," Brown said.

And in recent years, the veterinarians have not been able to find spaces to install technology such as MRI machines, said Andrew Parks, a professor of large animal surgery and head of the department of large animal medicine.

To produce more veterinarians, the vet school not only must add more students, but treat more animals, officials say — even though the hospital already has a caseload of more 18,000 a year.

Hospitals at universities such as North Carolina State, Tennessee and Florida are three times the size of UGA's animal hospital, which was built in 1979, but none have a caseload as large as UGA's, according to veterinary college officials.

Meanwhile, the state's population has grown from about 5.4 million in 1980 to nearly 10 million now — and the number of pets and other animals has grown along with the number of people, Allen said.

When the new Veterinary Medical Learning Center opens in Southeast Clarke County, the college will be split into two parts — students will take their first two years of basic courses on campus at D.W. Brooks Drive and Carlton Street. In their second two years, students would shift their studies 2.7 miles east to the new center on College Station Road.

Some residents of nearby neighborhoods worry about the extra traffic the new center could bring to the area, but the presidents of two nearby neighborhood associations said they would welcome the teaching hospital.

"I think it will be great for the neighborhood to get a facility like that," said Keith Flaute, president of the University Heights Neighborhood Association. "It would just enhance the neighborhood."

Kent Middleton, president of the Green Acres-Crestwood Community Association and a University of Georgia journalism professor, had not seen the plans yet but is not worried about the hospital's impact on nearby residential areas.

"Generally, I think people are pleased to have the university out there as opposed to more fast-food restaurants or a big shopping center," Middleton said.

The university's proposal estimates the cost of the new center at about $110 million.

The state of Georgia would pay most of the cost, but South Carolina, which pays for part of the operating costs of the school in exchange for a fixed number of slots, also would chip in more than $20 million.

About $15 million will be privately funded, Allen said.

South Carolina residents are guaranteed 17 slots a year now; the state's educational officials want to double the number to 34 in the new facility, Allen said.

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PROJECT PIPELINE

A new Veterinary Medical Learning Center isn't the only new building University of Georgia planners hope to see rising in the next few years.

Planners are working on other projects worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

One just under way is a $46 million special collections library for the university's rare books, manuscripts, videos and other historical collections, UGA Campus Architect Danny Sniff told a recent meeting of the Athens Federation of Neighborhoods.

The library will rise off South Lumpkin Street, south of West Broad Street in what the university calls its Northwest Precinct.

Several other multimillion-dollar projects are on the horizon, though none yet has a definite starting dates.

Among them:

— A Science Learning Center between UGA's South and East campuses, envisioned as a science-oriented counterpart to UGA's Miller Learning Center, with classrooms and lab space. Penciled in for what now is mainly a parking lot between UGA's complex of science buildings and a group of fraternity houses off River Road, the building would cost about $50 million, according to documents submitted to the University System Board of Regents.

— A new Health Sciences Campus on what now is the U.S. Navy Supply Corps School in Normaltown. UGA officials plan to use the Prince Avenue campus for the university's medical partnership with the Medical College of Georgia, but at least part of the College of Public Health also will move into buildings on the 58-acre campus.

The medical campus expansion will be relatively inexpensive, according to UGA officials; President Michael Adams likened the conversion to paying $10 million for property worth $80 million to $90 million.

— A $72 million building for the College of Family and Consumer Sciences, off south Lumpkin Street near the new special collections library.

Once home to UGA fraternity houses facing Lumpkin and Baxter streets, the area also someday could house the Terry College of Business.